Picasso's two Guitar constructions–one in cardboard, one in sheet metal–bracket a brief but intense period of experimentation in the artist's long career. It is this moment in his work, and the place of these two modest yet revolutionary objects within it, that Picasso: Guitars 1912–1914 explores.

Here Picasso embedded cutouts of newspaper, hand-painted faux boix paper, and colored artist's paper in a network of charcoal shading and drawn planes. The text in the inverted newspaper column acts as a kind of ready-made hatching that echoes Picasso's shaded passages in charcoal, while the hand-drawn linear scaffolding in the lower-right corner responds to the typographic elements and blank spaces in the newspaper clipping.